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May 2009: Amazing variety of contest winners

In the past year or so it seems that the new UCT/MCTS systems have opened
up the field of computer Go programs.
Just the other day Fuego won the 2009 Computer Olympiad in Pamplona Spain and just before that
a new proggram Zen surprised everyone with an outstanding series of games
on CGOS and KGS. So programs with at least some claim at being top dog at the moment include:

And what's more, after an (admittedly short) series of test games the publisher
of Go++ in Japan had just reported a positive score for the new Japanese Go++
against the new Japanese release of Many Faces of Go when both are running on dual
core PC's. So we should perhaps add in Go++ to this list.
The next few years will certainly be interesting. Lets see if any of these programs can pull
away from the pack.

Mar 2009: Wulu.com resurrected

In honour of the late Chen Zhixing and for the historical record,
I have re-created the last know state of his website wulu.com.

Feb 2009: Recent Computer-Human Challenges

There has recently been a flurry of challenge games
between some of the top UCT inspired programs running
on multi processor computers and top ranked humans.
Nick Wedd has kindly made up a web page detailing some of the results.

Professor Chen Zhixing 1931 - 2008

It is with great sadness that I have to report the death of Chen Zhixing.
He was probably the most successful go programmer of all time,
winning the Ing cup four times, the FOST cup three times and the Garosu Cup.
He was my arch rival for many years and we had a great many close games.
I shall miss our rivalry and our friendship.

I found this short biography taken from the International Who's Who of Intellectuals, 12th ed., 1997:
Chen Zhixing was born May 1931 in Guangzhou, South China. He graduated in 1952 from the Chemistry Department of Zhongshan University, Guangzhou and began his educational and researching career in the same university. He become a full Professor in 1983.Professor Chen's major field of research was quantum chemistry and the outcomes were collected in his book "Organic Molecular Orbital Theory" published in 1991. Computer aid instruction was also his successful research, and a series of teaching softwares won the National Prize of Excellent Outcome of Teaching Research in 1989. He acquired the title of National Labour Model in the Educational System in 1986 and retired in 1991.

MoGo beats Pro!

A copy of MoGo running on an 800 core supercomputer won a one hour, 9-stone handicap game against 8Dan Pro, Kim Myungwan (Korea). You can read a report of the event
here. It it not clear how seriously the pro was playing, as it was reported that he only used "about 10 or 12 minutes" out of his allotted time.

Dec 2007: Crazystone wins UEC cup.

The UEC cup was held at the University of
Electro-communications, Tyofu, Tokyo, Japan.
27 programs competed.
After the event Crazy Stone played an exhibition game against a 5dan player with no
handicap. Crazy Stone lost (professinal Go player Tei Meikou
stopped the game halfway).

June 2007: The rise of UCT: Mogo wins 19x19 Go at the 12th Computer Olympiad

Mogo proves itself to be the strongest of the new breed of UCT-based programs, beating the more famous
GNU-Go into third place, with another UCT program CrazyStone coming 2nd. The initial developpement of Mogo was by Yizao Wang with Sylvain Gelly, Rémi Munos and Olivier Teytaud. For more information on MoGo see: http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm. For full results of the events at the computer olympiad, see here.

April 2007: David Elsdon

It is with sadness that I have to report the death of David Elsdon, author of the program "GL7" (written in prolog). At the time of writing his website is
still on-line so you can read a little about him and his work here.

December 2005: Go++ wins 9th KGS Computer Go Tournament

November 2005: Go++ v 6.0 released

After their success at Gifu, KCC decided to release "KCC 6" in Japan. In a 250 game test (requiring six fast PC's and a whole weekend)
Go++v6 won more than half.

November 2005: Gifu 2005

This years Gifu contest was won by KCC, Many Faces of Go was 2nd and GnuGo 3rd. The full results table can be found here.
Hiroshi Yamashita has put some photos from the contest here.

June 2005: Supercomputer beats Go++ by half a point

In a nailbiting match, SlugGo running on 18(!) 2GHz G5 processors defeated Go++ by
half a point during the latest KGS computer Go Tournament. SlugGo is a project
to try out novel search techniques employing multiple copies of GNUGO running on
separate machines.

April 2005: KGS Computer GO tournaments

Nick Wedd has started to organise
regular friendly computer go tournaments on KGS. He has
written up the results as well as detailed instructions on how to enter here.

February 2005: New program "Go Wind"

Ruhai Zhou has made his program Go Wind available to play online
at www.geocities.com/shanleqi/index.html.
It seems to play nice shape, but as far as I can tell it is not too good at keeping count of it's eyes.

January 2005: New version of WinHonte

Its been nearly three years since Fredrik Dahl released his
first version of WinHonte, now at long last he's produced an update. Sadly it's no
longer free, but there is a trial version that will play at full strength up until move 50. For more
information go to Jellyfish-go.com.

October 2004: Disappointing turnout at Gifu 2004

The decision not to allow "postal" entries to the Gifu contest this
year and the insistence of yet another new communications protocol
resulted in a poor turnout. The contest was more remarkable
for who wasn't there than who was! No Many Faces, no GnuGo, no Go++,
no Haruka, no Goemate. KCC unsurprisingly won the mainly local tournament.

July 2004: Amazing results at Computer Olympiad

Go intellect was world champion in 1994 but since then seemed to have
gone into reverse... that is until now. Astonishingly it has just won the
computer olympiad held in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Equally astonishing was the
second to last placing of GnuGo which had recently had such good results.

July 2004: New open-source project launched

David Weiss has just announced the creation of a
new open source Go project called "Moyoman".
David is hoping that it will become AGA 1 Dan with 100 man-years effort!
The program is being developed in Java.

March 2004: The "Random Go Challenge"

Gunnar Farneback has started the Random Go Challenge, an exercise
to see what kind of program can do best against a random player.
It also serves as a simple way for Go programmers to test their
implementations of the increasingly popular GTP protocol.
Click here for more details.

January 2004: Go++ gets gets full-time go consultant

Go++ now has two people working full time on its development.
Tomotaka Urasoe, a Japanese 6Dan has joined Michael Reiss and
is now responsible for all Joseki and Fuseki patterns as well as general
Go consultancy.

November 2003: GnuGo getting stronger!

GnuGo has just won the Computer Olympiad 2003 winning all of its games. The field
included a total of eleven mainly amateur programs.

September 2003: New address for computer go mailing list

August 2003: Updated "Go Programmers Hall of Fame" pictures.

August 2003: Shock result: Gifu Challenge won by KCC!

After several years of poor performances KCC unexpectedly take world title. See: My report and Some Photos

April 2003: Go++ v 4.1 released

Go++ (the new name for Go4++) has just been made available for the western market.
It also has it's own new website Goplusplus.com.
The program had previously been sold under the name "Go Professional III" which
was based on a rather old version of the Go4++ engine, but this latest release
is hot off the press, directly from the author.

July 2002: Many Faces of Go wins 21st Century Cup

David Fotland made up for his recent disappointing ladder results by pulling out a
surprise victory at the 21st Century Cup in Edmonton, Canada. Interestingly,
for the first time ever, a neural network program has had some success, with
Neuro Go coming a creditable 6th.

May 2002: GoAhead topples the mighty Many Faces of Go!

On May 12th Peter Woitke's GoAhead defeated Many Faces of Go in a
four-game match 3-1 to move forward to 2nd place on the Computer Go Ladder.

May 2002: Go4++ takes lead in Stefan Mertin's huge 13x13 contest

In most computer go contests each program will play each other only once, leaving
a lot of room for luck to be involved. Stefan Mertin has taken it upon himself to run
his own private tournament where each program plays each of its rivals multiple times.
This is very time consuming and the contest is still not over. For more information
see Stefan's page.

March 2002: Jellyfish enters the field

Fredrik Dahl, the author of the world famous Jellyfish Backgammon program has just released a "preliminary version" of a Go program called "WinHonte". It can
be downloaded for free from Jellyfish-go.com.
He started work on go programming in his spare time about six years ago.
His program uses a combination of several different
neural nets for different aspects of the game, such as shape evaluation and
territory estimation. Some nets are trained by self play, others from expert
games. The program also uses apha-beta search for local problems like
connectivity and life-and-death. He has yet to test WinHonte in a systematic way, but it has beaten Handtalk
version 97.06E a couple of times without handicap on a 19x19 board (but lost more).